At Gulag Cemetery, a Struggle Against Forgetting

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These morn-ings, as the all-night twilight of an Arctic summer brightens into real day, Stanislavas Grintsyavicius can be found tending anonymous graves in a gnat-infested field near the Yurshor Coal Mine.

Beneath the weedy tundra lie the founding fathers of this important coal-producing outpost, inmates of one of the toughest forced labor colonies in Stalin's Gulag.

Now the neglected plot of numbered stakes, partly covered by an asphalt road, is Mr. Grintsyavicius's little battleground in the war against forgetting.

''People here have gone directly from fear to indifference,'' he said abjectly the other morning, just back from an unsuccessful search for a donation of cement to anchor the large wooden cross that is his latest embellishment.

But preoccupied with the hardness of their own lives and the darkness of their own memories, the population of Vorkuta has been slow to acknowledge the strata of suffering that lie, quite literally, beneath them.

Vorkuta, even during the brief summer thaw, is uninviting, and all the more bleak for the tumbledown former prison barracks that still serve as dismal accommodation for many residents.

Forty hours by train from Moscow, the city still retains its sense of isolation.

It is officially closed to foreigners -a Western reporter and photographer were admitted in the company of the Russian President, Boris N. Yeltsin -and although today's citizens come for premium wages rather than penal servitude, residents say it is still hard to escape.

The impediment now is not barbed wire but the Soviet internal pass system and the chronic housing shortage that make it very difficult for Soviets to move to more desirable cities.

''Most people come here for the money,'' said Vitaly Popov, a 45-year-old coal miner and, great rarity, a native. ''Then they get old and there's nowhere to go. It's a kind of self-exile.''

The coal miners here relish their reputation as the most politically tough-minded in the country.

When the coal basins of Russia and the Ukraine were shut by strikes last summer, the 13 mines of Vorkuta were the first to go beyond the demands for refrigerators and soap to seek overtly political concessions, including an end to the Communist Party's monopoly on political power. In October they defied a court order and went on strike again.

Miners say their radicalism is less a legacy of confrontational prison days than a consequence of the Klondike character. Miners lured here by the higher wages tend to be the more ambitious, better educated and less domesticated.

Vorkuta was uninhabited until the 1930's, when geologists discovered high-quality coal in the Pechora Basin, below the Arctic plain. A decade later the Gulag - an acronym for the State Camp Administration - opened its first penal colony. At the peak there were about 30 camps of builders, railroad workers and especially coal miners - each with its lice-infested barracks, its barbed wire stockade, its meager rations and its cemetery.

The inmates included Soviet soldiers who had the misfortune to fall into enemy hands - first in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40, then in World War II - and who could not be trusted upon return. There were Ukrainians and Lithuanians rounded up as nationalists, actors and scholars suspected of harboring unpatriotic ideas, and relatives of any of the above.

At the Vorkuta Historical Museum, which has recently devoted a room to pictures and relics of the camps, there are posters from prison camp theatrical productions featuring prominent actors and singers who fell afoul of Stalin's temper.

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''The intellectual and cultural potential of the city was very high then,'' said Vitaly A. Troshin, head of the Vorkuta branch of Memorial, a society that seeks honor for the victims of Stalinism. ''But the political prisoners were mixed with hardened criminals, who were eventually given much of the management of the camps. They also added to the culture of Vorkuta - an anti-culture.'' #1,000 Victims Accounted For Mr. Troshin said Memorial had accounted for more than 1,000 camp victims still living in Vorkuta, and believes many more remain too afraid or ashamed to identify themselves.

The other night seven of them gathered at the historical museum to reminisce, fluently recounting dates and names from 50 years ago.

''When I got out in 1945, they gave me a certificate saying 'He has chosen Vorkuta as his permanent place of residence,' '' recalled Dmitri I. Zhemchuzhenikov, who was sent to Vorkuta in 1940 after falling captive to the Finns. ''This was a surprise to me. If they'd let me go, I'd have gone.''

Later he was officially rehabilitated, but had already sunk roots here. He worked 29 more years in and around the mines as a nominally free man.

Anna V. Krikun, who was arrested in Sevastopol in 1939 two years after her stepfather was shot as an enemy of the people, traces a relationship by her mother's marriage to the Romanovs, the last family of czars. Today, at 68, she lives alone on a poverty-line pension in a Vorkuta apartment.

''I believe in the Russian people,'' Miss Krikun declared, by way of summing up her attitude after a lifetime spent in a place she never chose. ''Somehow they will think things through and find a way to turn for the better.''

The state began closing the camps here in the late 1950's, leaving now a single prison for repeat offenders. Mr. Troshin said the last known political prisoner, a Lithuanian poet, was freed last year.

Arguing that remembering is a prerequisite for civilization, Memorial has pressed its campaign to honor and commemorate those who suffered here, with some success.

An emigre sculptor, Ernst Neizvestny, has visited and sketched plans for a memorial to be built by the River Vorkuta, overlooking the first prison campsite. The society talks of a tourist hotel for Gulag pilgrims, of publishing the memoirs it has accumulated, of winning better pensions for survivors.

Memorial has also encouraged Mr. Gritsyavicius in his tending of the prison graveyard. It is the only labor camp cemetery that survives, and it has added significance because it contains the mass grave of prisoners gunned down in a prison strike in August 1953.

From Hobby to Obsession

For Mr. Grintsyavicius, who fled anti-nationalist repressions in Lithuania in 1956 to become an early self-exile here, the graveyard began as a kind of hobby and became an obsession after one of his sons, who helped in the project, was killed last year in a mining accident.

He says he has been mocked and shunned for his efforts, called a bandit, a fool and a fascist.

Official resistance is no longer a obstacle, Mr. Troshin said, Memorial and the striking miners having combined forces in this year's local election campaign to oust the Communist Party loyalists from the city council.

But the public indifference, he said, is harder to shake. Partly it is the silencing fear and pain of the repressed and their descendents. Partly it is the influence of the surviving prison guards and their descendents, who have no interest in reviving the subject.

Mostly, he said, it is that past tragedy seems less pressing to people who still make their way to outdoor toilets in the slicing wind of a minus-60-degree winter.

A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 1990, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: At Gulag Cemetery, a Struggle Against Forgetting. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe